Kane County board vs. Circuit Court Clerk Seyller: How'd it get so ugly?

It was already way past too late when Kane County Board member Mike Kenyon told Circuit Court Clerk Deborah Seyller the board sincerely wanted to work with her to get her budget in line with their expectations.

"If we are singling you out, it's because you don't communicate with us," Kenyon said.

As it turns out, it may be communication that occurred at a meeting most members of the county board never knew about that first made Seyller assume a combative position.

"This started out back in the spring when I e-mailed every single board member, and I asked you not to do blanket cuts," Seyller informed Kenyon and the Judicial and Public Safety Committee, which oversees her budget.

"I got a visit from the vice chair. She basically said, 'We welcome a lawsuit to set precedent because the laws are unclear in the state of Illinois regarding mandates. What followed was the orchestration of media and theatrical comments. I've really just had enough. It's not my place to take a lawsuit when somebody says I'm not getting my (mandates) done."

Seyller secured an outside attorney shortly after that conversation, and the welcome mat was replaced by gnashing teeth and heated questions every time Seyller showed up for a meeting.

Kenyon and other board members on the committee working on Seyller's budget said they never knew such a confrontation occurred until Seyller told them about it. But Seyller's version of that meeting only tells half the story.

Cathy Hurlbut is the vice chairman of the county board. In lean budget times back in the mid-1990s, she earned an unflattering moniker for her hardline budget stances. But Hurlbut says she visited Seyller as a member of the board's Finance Committee at the meeting Seyller spoke of.

"I told her not everything you do can possibly be a mandate," Hurlbut recalled. "Then she talked about what she perceived the county board could do to cut their budget."

Over the course of a 90-minute meeting, Hurlbut said Seyller shared tales of grief about members of the circuit court clerk's staff dressing in black from head to toe in protest of their working conditions. And, eventually, the idea of Seyller suing the county board did arise.

"I told her I don't know that it's a bad idea," Hurlbut said. "It wasn't a kind of bring-it-on conversation, but it wasn't a we're-going-to-shy-away-from-that-route conversation either. I wish I was the big, bad goon in the room. But it wasn't dictatorial."

Hurlbut and the Finance Committee are next in line to review Seyller's budget before the full county board takes a vote. On Tuesday Seyller proposed a 2010 budget that was a 27 percent increase over 2009's.